The last ten years has seen mobile phones revolutionize how people communicate, coordinate, and socialize. Mobile phones have become an integral part of the feeling of connectedness that friends and family share with one another, allowing them to keep in touch regardless of location. While voice communication is highly natural and expressive, it also requires immediate attention, occasional privacy, quiet surroundings, and does not scale well for coordinating within medium/large groups of people.
Text messaging, also know as SMS (Short Message Service), is a lightweight text communication tool for mobile phones. As the name implies, messages are very short, limited to 160 characters for most encoding schemes. SMS allows one person with an SMS-enabled phone to send a text message to another person with an SMS-enabled phone. SMS-enabled phones are in widespread use in Europe and Japan and gaining acceptance in the United States.
Despite the many advancements of mobile phone technology, communicating with more than one person at a time can be cumbersome, time consuming, and/or inconvenient particularly when dealing with time-sensitive information. Furthermore, with all the social uses of mobile phones, text messaging in its basic form lacks any features to support social coordination among a group of friends.